Saturday, July 14, 2018

Control the Controllables

By

Scott D. Parker

Why is it we writers and creators sometimes suffer
from bouts of doubt? In my day job as a technical writer, I’m never
without things to do and proper procedures to do them. Dittos for
thousands of other skills. But we creators still suffer.

Mine wasn’t horrible or earth-shattering. It
stemmed from a couple of things. One was the diminishing of the natural
high one gets when completing a story. I submitted a story to an
upcoming western anthology and, if accepted, it’ll be
published in the fall. And boy do I love this yarn. Enjoyed reading it
aloud to my wife who also seemed to enjoy it—not always a given. She’s a
spectacular first reader/listener because she’ll tell me like it is,
especially if a story doesn’t work for me.
The other thing that got me down for a time was the just-as-critical
sequel to writing “the end”: what’s next? With my day job, I have a
rather long commute and, as a result, my personal time is quite limited.
I still carve out time to write, but this week
was mostly a failure. It happens from time to time. I used to see how
long I could go writing each day. Then I didn’t. Now, I’m wondering if I
should just so I can maintain the writing muscle.

On the business side of things, there are always a
ton of things to do. Most of the time, I actually enjoy them. In fact,
I’m in the middle of planning my fall’s published output and into 2019.
It’s a good schedule and one I hope will reap
some dividends.

And that’s where some of my thoughts went to this
week: the other end of the process. The future reader seeing a story of
mine, seeing the cover, reading the blurb, and making the decision to
spend money. I can’t remember where I recently
heard the phrase “control the controllables” but it reentered the
forefront of my head again this week. What do I have control over? The
prose of the book itself, the descriptions and all the meta-data, the
covers and how they look, and setting the price.
That’s it. There isn’t a darn thing else I control. Well, there’s one
more thing: where the book is located. I’ve recently gone wide again, so
my stories are available in most major online bookstores.

Well, there is one more thing I can at least have a
say in: discoverability. I can control how I market, where I market,
how much I spend on marketing, and so forth. But at the end of the day,
it ain’t up to me whether a person reads one
of my stories. It’s all on them. I cannot control their thought pattern
and decision making. All I can do—all any of us can do—is put the best
product out there and see what happens.

I know this is all not earth-shattering or
brand-new, but, every so often, we creators need to be reminded of what
we can control. It’s also a good reminder that all of us creatives have
those moments of doubt. Just yesterday, famed Batman
artist Greg Capullo (@GregCapullo) wrote this tweet:

For those struggling artists out there, know that I
struggle too. After decades of drawing for a living, there are days
when it seems like I’ve forgotten how to draw! It sucks. You suck, I
suck, we all suck! …sometimes.

New DC Comics writer, Brian Michael Bendis (@BrianMBendis) followed it up with “Seconded.”